Learning new Microsoft Office tricks in "just a minute"
OK… I haven’t lost my mind here… It is very possible that if you have a large spreadsheet that has very little data in it, you might have a large number of blank rows in one of your worksheets. Each of those “blank” cells in the “blank” rows takes up space, and it can add up rather quickly when it comes to the overall size of your spreadsheet… let me show you how to fix that.
Today’s tip comes courtesy of Francis Hayes – The Excel Addict, where he explains how to simulate a “paper tape” function in Excel. For you young’uns who are confused by this concept… in the olden days, people used to add numbers on an adding machine, which often produced a paper tape as the numbers were entered. You would get a total, plus a visual list of numbers that got you to that total. You could then confirm that you entered everything correctly. Some habits die hard however, and here’s how you can do the same type of “paper tape” function in Excel.
I think that OneNote is one of the coolest tools in the entire Microsoft portfolio of products. It’s like the Ginsu knife of personal productivity (if I just aged myself with that reference, you can catch up here… The Ginsu (Commercial Offer, 1980)). One feature of OneNote I want to cover today is the ability to print to OneNote just like you would print to a printer or a PDF file. Here’s how…
Planner is a great lightweight planning tool that comes as part of Office 365. We’re seeing quite a bit of attention to it by Microsoft, and they’ve just released a new feature that I’ve had people request quite often… you can now create a new plan from an existing one. This means you can create a standard plan “template” that has all the items you normally want for a new project, and then use that for each new plan you create (as opposed to adding all the tasks manually). Here’s how that works…
This tip is the result of someone asking me yesterday whether they could edit a transcript once a video had been uploaded to Microsoft Stream. My initial thought was either “no” or “you can upload your own”, but then I hit the interwebs for some research. Much to my surprise, you *can* edit a video transcript, and it’s pretty easy!
This was a simple little thing I saw Sandra Mahan do during a Teams meeting yesterday, but it had completely skipped my notice earlier. When you’re in a Teams Channel tab (other than Conversation), you can expand the screen to remove all the Teams information on the left side of your screen. There’s an Expand Tab icon that does that for you. Here’s how it works.
There are times when you are working on a Word document, and you have to match the formatting on your content to formatting found somewhere else in the document. Rather than try and figure out the font settings, you can instead use the Format Painter option to automatically match things up. Here’s how…
In the Conversation tabs of your various Microsoft Teams channels, you can have a lot of information going back and forth that just sort of blends together into a blur. That’s fine for the normal team chatter, but you may have something to post in there that should be more noticeable than everything else. That’s when you want to use the Formatting feature in the post area. Here’s how to do that…
If you belong to a number of Microsoft Team workspaces, it can be a little overwhelming to keep track of all the conversations and activities going on in every one of the Teams you are part of. However, you can use the Activity Stream and the associated filter to make it easier to see just the items that are most important to you at that point in time. Here’s how that works…
